~ What It’s Like To Be An Empath And A Highly Sensitive Person ~

‘I know you before you speak, and you love me before you know it’

Lately we hear a lot about highly sensitive people and empaths. And that’s no wonder. Now as the interest in spirituality is at raise, more and more people open up their psychic abilities.

What means being a highly sensitive person?
It means that whenever you go out to interact with people, animals, things, and do daily activities like work, studies, being in town, going for a walk, listening to the music, or simply watching tv – all these simple experiences have a crashing effect on you.

Comparing to people with an average level of sensitivity, highly sensitive people get influenced double or triple by anything they see, hear and interact with. It touches them deeply and stays in their memory for a long time.

Highly sensitive people have an inborn ability to feel the vibrations and radiations of anything around them, and anything they come in contact with.
Sensitives and empaths often live lives without realizing why there is always so much pain and melancholy inside their soul, even though it feels like there should be no reasons for it. But it is always there on a background, no matter how good and comfortable their own lifestyles may be.

No matter how happily these people build their own lives, they just can’t get rid of the feeling that ‘something bad may happen’ or somebody might get in trouble.They don’t know the cause of it, but there is always a slight feeling of unrest inside them that they can’t conquer.

These people may go on and on in this mode for years, and simply don’t know that they have an inborn ability to absorb and channel the ‘feelings’ of everything around them, and through themselves.
It is a natural involuntary skill, a broadened perception.

Often they literary carry the pain of the world on their shoulders.
The reality is often rather a hard place for them to live in, and they search their means of escaping or reshaping it in some way.
That’s why sensitives usually make great musicians, writers, dancers, charity volunteers, and good will ambassadors.
But another part of them are also alcoholics, chain smokers and suicidals.

If the gift is recognized and well-handled, it can be directed into many useful fields, like teaching, natural healing, counseling, charity, volunteering and so on.
But if the ability of acute perception is not understood or twirls the wrong ways, it may turn a person’s life into hell, leading him or her a into nervous breakdowns and mental institutions.

Highly sensitive people range from selfless altruists to solitary secludes that turn away from people in order to escape the pain of that reality, but they may never stay indifferent.

I myself suffered from empathic abilities for years. They do make your living uncomfortable until you acknowledge them, and learn how to handle them right.

The smallest scenes of someone’s pain, misery or injustice would drive me mad. Sometimes I really wished I could care just a little bit less, but it never worked.
Being an empath you feel you are responsible for everybody’s pain and happiness, and you really get sore when you are not able to help everywhere.

People would always come to me in a bad mood, feeling down or ill, and within our short interaction they would visibly change back to happy and leave in high spirits, while I would start feeling a bit low, develop headaches, or discover the same physical symptoms they had.

Empaths have a natural quality of ‘feeling with’ everybody, and so they may easily absorb others’ illnesses and negative emotions, and return people back a delicious recharge of positive refreshing energy that comes from their own innermost resources.
That’s why natural healers seem to take their patients’ illnesses on themselves, and sometimes get down with ailments, unless they use techniques of dropping them off themselves, e.g. into the ground, water, etc.

But I wasn’t a healer, and I used to believe I was simply impressive, and viewed it as weakness.
And while everybody else always seemed to get happy people around and sleet tight at night, I kept encountering people in need, ill elderly people, confused grownups that couldn’t find their place in life, heartbroken girlfriends, and a lot of mistreated animals; let alone nightmares and tugging of my family and friends’ maladies.

Only years later I learned to handle the sensitivity gift well, and directed it into helping others without losing myself energetically.

Empaths need a constant adjustment and meditation in order to keep their psychic balance and energetic wholeness. But the joyful benefits of it come back in a number of happy friends, devoted partners, love of animals and reverence of the surrounding.

While empaths bring harmony into the lives of people around them, they balance their own living between pain and an attempt to become actually happy themselves some day.